With less than a week to go until 2016’s PHPNW, it’s time to start getting geared up for Friday night’s hackathon! If you haven’t got your hackathon ticket already, make sure you sign into your ticket management and add it in - it’s always an excellent experience.

Last week I attended, through the Air Cadets, a pilot course on Youth Mental Health First Aid (YMHFA). A pilot course in the sense that it was being piloted within the Air Cadets. I came away humbled, motivated, sad, but with a desire to do more for the young people I work with as a volunteer on a regular basis.

Stuff I’ve learnt. That’s a hell of a lot of stuff. As the saying goes, “every day is a school day” and I absolutely subscribe to that fact. My posts here are somewhat few and far between which is in itself an odd thing as the idea was that this repository of words was to be a reminder to myself of what I’d learnt, or handy tips that I’d later refer back to. It doesn’t appear that I’ve carried that off somewhat…

Tonight at BrightonPHP we welcomed down Michael Cullum to speak to the group on “How we build phpBB: The Next Generation”.
Michael is part of the core team for phpBB as well as a back-end Symfony2 developer and organiser of the PHP Surrey
user group. I used phpBB a fair while ago and hadn’t had a good introduction to it, so I was interested to see how far
it had come in that time.